All passive resonators have a finite unloaded Q factor. In narrow bandwidth applications this resistive loss can lead to difficulties in the design process. In a bandpass application, designs which provide for both a good input and output match will exhibit transfer characteristics with significant amplitude variation over the passband if mid-band loss is minimised. This passband variation can only be reduced with given Q factors if the mid-band loss is increased possibly to an unacceptable level. Even in the case of a single resonator filter, problems occur due to the resistive loss which prevents a good input and output match being simultaneously achievable.
In the case of a rapid transition from passband to stopband, the resistive loss of the resonators causes a roll off of the insertion loss into the passband. A reduction in unloaded Q can quickly cause this loss to reach an unacceptable level particularly where noise figure is important and the filter has been introduced to reject signals which would limit the dynamic range of the receiver. This requirement now exists in several countries where new cellular telephone frequency bands have multi-use configurations such as that which arises in the refarming of terrestrial television bands.
In conventional filters, each resonator couples loss into the system. To meet typical requirements at least 25 dB rejection has to be provided over a band in excess of several MHz whilst the loss at 0.5 MHz into the passband has to be less than 0.5 dB. To achieve this, unloaded Q's of greater than 20,000 are required resulting in the necessity, at microwave frequencies, to use dielectric resonators for all of the cavities resulting in a physically large, heavy and expensive filter.